instead of the 20 minute margin you allowed yourself to the next customer visit, you now are *forced* to wait for the updates to complete, and run late for an otherwise comfortable start of the meeting.
Recently I hit 'off' on my (boss issued) Win10 laptop at the end of my shift and it tried to blue-screen-update me to death. Like HAL9000 thinking murder it kept muttering "Just a moment..." "Just a moment..." but I slammed the lid and unplugged it anyway. The battery took over with glee. I got out the door before it grasped my intention and sprinted to my car, tossed it into the back seat but the door would not close because WIFI was still trying to access the Internet. I tossed it in the trunk and tied the lid down with a bungee, and a couple hundred yards down the road I heard a 'thunk!' and with some squealing of tires, broke free. Down the highway it kept tugging the wheel towards Seattle and the 'popup notification' sound kept sounding over the radio. Street signs were vibrating and a blinding-bright Windows logo descended in the rear view mirror. As I sped past McDonalds it hit the public WIFI for a moment, almost swerving me into the curb. My "check engine" light came on but that is just because my gas cap is loose, go figure. The wipers came on and would not turn off, but that is normal too. My car has problems. Finally pulled into the driveway and it snapped onto my WIFI so hard the case stuck to the front door. I wrestled it inside and set it up, leaving the plug inches away from the wall socket. Little white balls still juggling on a blue background, we stared each other down. As soon as it realized I was not going to plug it in until it finished, the progress counter started moving faster until with a grunt it vomited up the startup screen.
There was also a post-login update process, but that is another story.
Try doing that in XP and you find one file among thousands is locked. It will complain and stop there leaving the remaining files.
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, you'll remember you can Control-Z/undo to reverse the effect of a Windows copy... BUT if you do it now are you fixing the effects of the aborted copy, or are you undoing the last successful drag'n'drop operation you performed? Or will nothing happen? Would you still be confused about this if I hadn't said anything?
You're going to have to make a choice. In the one hand you'll have Morpheus' life and in the other hand you'll have your own. If you select Control-Z/Undo, one of you is going to die. Which one will be up to you. I'm sorry, kiddo, I really am. You have a good soul, and I hate giving good people bad news. Oh, don't worry about it. As soon as you step outside that door, you'll start feeling better. You'll install Cygwin and start using rsync all the time, and can devote the remainder of your days to fixing file ownership and permission problems. You'll remember you don't believe in any of this Windows crap. You're in control of your own life, remember?
Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you finish copying these files, you'll feel right as rain.
"Working on it..." and a green progress bar. I have just a few (maybe 60) entries. The damn thing cant open a folder with a few files without making me wait. WTF MS???
Many happy little committees have met over the years to help you. All of their ideas were Good Ideas. Every idea only "increased loading by 0.x percent!" but the combined percentages have added to 20,000% thus far. And some of the ideas were APIs for Microsoft Partners and Script Kiddie Partners to sink their pus-filled meat hooks into your bloated registry to affect basic computer operation. Every time you open a folder...
All 32x32 icons on the system are upsampled to 1024x1024 and scaled down again; Microsoft Security Essentials loads completely, realizes you turned it off a year ago, then unloads; Windows checks for updates; Internet explorer checks to see if it is the default browser (it isn't); two dozen corrupted registry branches left by incomplete installs are accessed and the system looks for 50 programs that aren't there; the ILOOKATEVERYTHING utility is run because it installed a registry to look at everything though you have never used it; Windows converts extensions to MIMETYPES and back again just for shits and giggles; media handlers load in multiple threads; folder display flags are inexplicably set to the dumbest view possible; everything is alphabetized; Windows re-sorts by 'group'; a blank window is shown; media apps are struggling to produce thumbnails; (W10 only) inactivity! Time to reboot NOW for updates; Cortana thought she heard you grunt, she transmits a voice-snippet over HTTPS; SSL certificate services loads causing everything else to swap out; certificates are checked for revocation because Paranoid Nerd Is Paranoid; media hooks still trying to make thumbnails; problems with media length detection on improperly encoded files causes long delay, then length is discarded anyway because "..." no one asked for it or there's no room on the display; now media metatag information is being accessed for NO DAMNED REASON; cute (but empty) film borders are painted, what the hell are film sprockets?? Where are those thumbnails??; file names finally appear, mostly hidden after "..."; virus checkers are invoked, both the one you use and the other OEM checker that Windows doesn't know is still operational; twenty smartphone-specific pieces of bullshit code briefly run and then exit (every second); a media codec triggers an Internet lookup for mysterious reasons; DNS delays stall 10 threads and an indeterminate amount of resources; DESKTOP.INI is accessed for Windows 95 compatibility; mouse pointer turns into a pointer for a moment just to torture you then flips to 'busy' again; Windows has synchronously finished counting files, GOLLY GEE, now you have an (unclickable) scroll bar; thumbnails finally starting to come in; dipshit 'subdirectory logic' is triggered for subfolders, all this shit starts to happen for them too; subfolder shit completes and the calculated result is discarded because it wasn't to be displayed anyway; OH HOLY SHIT, ANIMATE/THROB is on, we need more power Scotty because we need moving thumbnails; 3rd party media apps run to see if they are needed now (they're not); you clicked the right mouse button on an item to attempt to regain control which actually starts a whole new CONTEXT MENU WORLD OF SHIT completely separate from this shit; hold on, CrystalFonts has to smooth the edges before you can get control; timeouts for stalled threads finally trigger (cleanup routines delaying you again); a whole second goes by where everything is finished or stalled; inactivity triggers fire making you think the waking nightmare is still going on; finally THE FOLDER HAS BEEN DISPLAYED.
Queued mouse and keyboard desperation events have been detected! Launch stuff you clicked on, push that button that wasn't even there when you clicked, display a context menu and a balloon tool tip containing useless junk and wasn't that easy.
Photoshop and Lightroom. I'm more or less forced to use these tools because all competing products dropped off the face of the Earth
GRAB GOD by the GONADS and GO for GIMP. If you're completely familiar with Photoshop's menus, methods and basic tool functionality you'll have no problem going gibbering insane from Gimp's arbitrary different-ness. Gimp is so unique and unPhotoshopy you'll have to resort to extreme measures to learn it. This means find a cabin deep in the woods, bring a generator and lots of gasoline to stay there during the re-training process. Notify nearby law enforcement of your intentions.
Start by building your own Photoshop-to-Gimp cheat sheet but don't use paper, it soon gets clouded and smudged with tears and spittle. Carve your notes in a wooden desk or the computer case itself with a large bowie knife. Find an uncomfortable funny hat to wear and hog-tie your left arm to your right ear so your body has a unique tactile sensation while learning Gimp's idiosyncrasies. You should always use Gimp this way while wearing the hat, so if you need to use Photoshop again releasing the bonds will permit you to recall its use (and relate to friend and family you knew before you switched to Gimp) more easily.
It is good to notify your insurance company you intend to switch to Gimp. Failure to do so might indemnify them from paying out if they learn you are using it, whether the calamity is traceable to Gimp or not. This is where tipping off local law enforcement helps. Inexperienced detectives sometimes gloss over important details in their reports at the mere note of Gimp. I want to give you the best possible chance to spare yourself legal complications.
And by all means, experiment with the powerful scripting languages and hooks that Gimp provides. Since you'll probably lose touch with friends and family, these scripting tasks can occupy your mind as you descend into your poignantly silent darkness of the soul. There are some good books that may help you learn Gimp but I cannot tell you which ones, my copies have pages missing with bite marks. I think the pages were eaten.
The author had successfully trained himself in Gimp, but its details of operation are presently clouded by prescribed medication. Author has done desktop publishing for 25 years and has used Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe InDesign and Quark spanning 8 continents.
I run Linux and Windowsin each others' virtual machines. You can begin with either one running the other. Then create a VM of the outermost OS inside the inner VM. Apply a bit of soap to the screen and hook four standard C-clamps to the innermost VM's window and the edge of the physical monitor. Then just each of the clamps a twist every few minutes and in a day or two the innermost VM window will be stretching against its parent. Line them up carefully and get a friend to help you, four hands at once are needed to get the inner window to 'snap' over the larger, otherwise you will just be chasing both around the screen. With four hands give the clamps a full twist and you will hear a 'PING!' sound.
Once the inner VM has snapped past the outer, continue to tighten all clamps until it is stretched/drawn to the corners of the screen. Then finally tap the clamps off with a sharp blow from of a hammer. As the last clamp is removed the computer will make a strange sound, as the machine's OS merges with the innermost VM. You have now created a Klein Nested VM with unique properties.
Since the original outer-to-inner paradigm has been broken both VMs are simultaneously child and parent of one another, and relative merit and demerit of each OS also (strangely) enters a tesseract-like state. Any two OS 'bred' together in this way become 'best of breed'.
You will also discover that the hardware abstraction layer has itself become an abstraction! Go ahead, gently tug the computer across the desk. You will see the spookily entangled OS hovering in the original position. You can even toss the computer you won't be needing it.
But if you move house you'll have to do it again. Before attempting this it is good to consult your lease to see if it may subject you to penalties or threats of eviction.
I have strace running on everything all the time, and spool the multiple strace logs directly to a console screen laying face-down on top of a large steel bucket. If you set console font size to zero it creates invisibly thin monofiliment character streams (think Ringworld shadow-square wire) that 'drop' off the screen. The bucket appears to be empty for days but then you see a slight blur of bottom features as the threads gather, which over several months becomes darker. When it becomes black it is best to empty the bucket before its density/weight punches through the floor. Worse things can happen too.
With strace already running all you have to do to examine a thread is snag it where it leaves the screen with a titanium hook, and pull it across to the electron microscope. Amazingly the stuff does not tangle. Once the cat knocked over the bucket and I was greeted by a fuzzy thing in the vague shape of a cat trailing a slippery shadow. Took awhile to free him because some of it was extending through the cat, requiring hours with the hook and a dose of worm medicine.
In the days before on-screen spellcheck there was a lady at our printshop who was voracious and speedy reader, but she was also a perfect final proofreader. Try as we might all we could do is plod along but she was fast and caught everything, every misspelling, word choice error, even inconsistent spaces. I asked her how one day. She made two passes over every paragraph, the first eyeballing the words in reverse order while noting only spelling and spacing. Then (in double-time she said) moving forward sounding the language normally for meaning, style and grammar.
While she was reverse reading she said, there was NO mental distraction from the actual message, to her it was like being presented a series of word puzzles/problems in a sort of "game" mode. Perhaps you could adapt yourself to examine troublesome code meticulously in reverse sequence this way while not perceiving the task. You seemingly work in some type of overlay mode where as you lay it down you are reproducing a (fuzzy) mental image.
If everything compiles perfectly in your brain, just use that and to blazes with the computer. Best of luck.
Until we find and kill the gnome that keeps turning on YouTube's AUTOPLAY option repeatedly despite cookies and preferences, there is no hope for human kind. Please join with me. It will take our combined effort to defeat it.
IN TOTAL BLISSFUL COMPLIANCE with the new directive that states that Chicago, praised be its name, will hold diplomas to students at any academic achievement level until they smear on this one last layer of dogmatic bullshit... I HUMBLY SUBMIT my action packed BUSINESS PLAN for the future.
It has been a long while since high school completion status had any direct bearing on functional intelligence. Traditional employers knew this at one time and routinely conducted interviews of job applicants, and used their super-duper powers of personal judgement to decide, during a brief conversation, whether an applicant's failure to complete high school would have been for academic reasons but far more important, to spot strengths in the individual that transcend academic ability. But today they lack the courage to conduct interviews and wish to sort people by their simple answers on computerized forms. Corporations wish to eliminate 'undesirables' from their applicant pools and exclude non-graduates routinely without any idea of whether those people would have performed the same or better. In this lack of empirical experimentation the HS flag has actually become a more theological construct than an actual measure of fitness.
If you doubt this consider modern use of the GED flag. Corporate applications require one to divulge whether their HS mark was derived from GED. Why? To further subsort applicants in sterile HR process and cast out more, of course. In a sense whether GED was used to complete HS is every bit as personal as asking directly what is the gender preference. 50 years ago GED was actually a mark of distinction, it identified the bearer as accelerated student or at the least, one who had taken extra time and effort to voluntarily obtain this mark into adulthood. But as employers devalued "the interview" and started grading on simple presence of the HS mark, masses of people obtained GED solely for the purpose of compliance, or so it is perceived. And so the GED is devalued today.
IT IS THIS THEOLOGICAL BIAS that I will, upon graduation, begin to exploit to my great personal advantage. MY BUDS IN THE HOOD know that THE MAN is out to REAM THEIR ASS, and they know that many cases they cannot be truthful and direct about their personal ambitions. They also know THE MAN IS READY TO TIP THE FBI should their revealing personal essays trip some SORRY-ASS PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE today or even in future years, since THE MAN KEEPS RECORDS FOREVER ON COMPUTERS TO KEEP THE BROTHERS DOWN. Therefore, in addition to being stellar students and completely ready to take on the responsibilities of society they know they must BULLSHIT THE MAN AND LAY DOWN ONE MORE PIECE OF CRAP INTO THE SYSTEM. They know it's gonna COST THEM to do it 'right'. As my principal mode of business I will be the one to do it for them and COLLECT.
I will open a number of "life coaching" centers that are uniquely streamlined to get through the process and FOOL THE MAN. My business will succeed because it will not be weighed down with real coaching, which would be an insult to their natural intelligence anyway. Since many will go on to make more money than I anyway. I will create underground literature that helps to make them paranoid about the process, even cast it into political terms. I will have race-based campaigns and blue-collar campaigns tailored to exploit the anxieties of each individual, to convince them that Chicago wants to get something from them to keep on file.
THEREFORE, my value-added "ambitions for the future" content sold by subscription and through HOOD franchises and COLLECTION 'AGENCIES', will supply these fine young men and women with a variety of quality custom life scenarios. They'll pick their future from a hat and I'll load the hat. My representatives will sit with them to describe their future profiles, develop a convincing presentation and ace the HS requirement.
I'll use computers too so it'll be great. I'm the MAN!
*sigh* These Euro-Myths never die, do they? No matter how often they are debunked, they just keep coming back.
But this is amazing! I had no knowledge of the EU myth, sole inspiration was my own four slice toaster (manufactured ~1993, Chicago) that has a switch. The Sunbeam Appliance Company surmised that given the choice two-slice people would use the switch to save energy in the absence of comprehensive trade regulation and Non-Governmental-Organization involvement at the regional level. As it turns out they were correct, but that is not the path we have taken.
Nearest I can figure the Voluntary Sunbeam Toaster Switch Experiment was never repeated. It was decided that the minutiae of everyday existence must be closely supervised and decisions of energy usage relegated to regional and global governance. Any technology that might encourage complacency in energy usage, and encourage a state of energy renaissance and wanton excess... such as the million-to-one energy density of nuclear, must be sabotaged. In its place a regime of austerity measures and a math-challenged fixation on Wind and Solar, leading us ever closer to the future accurately portrayed in Soylent Green.
My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?" It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tack" is continuously painted on the screen --- the card performed oddly spectacularly. It was that one score that when combined with the others, ranked the card above the competition. Suspicious, Gibson changed a single letter in the test phrase and the card's score dropped to a reasonable range. The card was apparently recognizing that a test was in progress and 'cheating' by failing to actually over-write this static text repeatedly.
I love the comment by the manufacturer when Gibson contacted them (read it!) but what intrigued the industry the most was that the cheat was not to be found in the Windows driver code, it had been embedded into the firmware of the accelerator chip. In the next Winbench version the test phrase jumped around the lazy screen's back during the test, rendering the cheat obsolete.
Has anyone done an energy study to estimate how much energy is consumed by EU "market surveillance authorities" and even the EU apparatus itself? Perhaps if we recognize the EU as a special case and stub the whole thing out with a rubber stamp, people will be able to watch HD television and toast four slices of bread at once and with former EU personnel in the workplace everyone will be able to work one less day a week with same pay.
THIS. Artificial Intelligence is the quest for Data (Star Trek) Machine Learning is the quest to model Dilbert's Boss and install it as your boss. Fuck 'Game Theory' and its 'myriad real world applications'.
I cannot wait for parasitic devices and ideas begin to feed off each other and off us, locked in a desperate struggle where tactics of escalation and power status notifications ---- not useful work --- becomes their primary function. Health monitors that damage health to charge and increase market share. Wearable devices that charge from human motion deliver shocks to cause motion, leaving a trail of sugar-depleted corpses. Wireless charged devices send "kill shots" to other devices to harness their chargers. WiFi parasites trigger encrypted porn downloads to maximize state-changes and harvest more energy. AT&T sends another circular trying to get us to switch to DirectTV. AT&T installs public megawatt Wifi outside your home to explode competitor's routers. Implantable devices that gather energy from tissue and decrease the nutrition of breast milk. speedtest.net consumes all traffic. Humans become minor players in symbiosis to ensure that Lithium-ion batteries reproduce. Cloud architecture virtualizes to the point of singularity when not a bit of actual hardware can be found. Interesting times.
I personally oversee a couple of ancient computers running a sewer plant with 32-bit Windows 7 that are locked down and completely stable. No calling home, private plant Ethernet and manual updates. In fact, while passing by a dumpster I was overjoyed to rescue an 8-year-old computer that had been CHUCKED by a fellow employee, and reconditioned it as another standby. Fortunately it wasn't hard to convince my (excellent) boss that of all the procurement choices --- and she was ready to spend some bucks --- that rejected computer (with a SATA Barracuda no less!) actually represented our best possible pick or the moment.
There are many platforms out there who would benefit to Just Say No to variable speed fans, 'green' features cycling disks on and off, CPUs and motherboards clocked beyond the mission so gamers can drive gigapixel displays and watch triple-HD television, OS choices that place you squarely into a world of someone else's evolving shit that becomes your shit when a creepy new feature gets away from Dr. Frankenstein.
These are appliances, not firewall-exposed Internet whipping posts bound to the lowest common denominator of corporate tactical desire and predatory engineering that always seems to trade for lifespan. Because Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
Time for Atlas to just Shrug Off for a generation or two. I'm grateful for people to suggest that we might have recourse to go all crybully-postal on our employers (wait! We didn't get hired! How does that work?) with class action lawsuits and all... but they're forgetting one thing, that isn't the kind of people we are, never have been. We stick with it or give polite ample notice and strike out for somewhere else, and we lack the gall to believe that a good working relationship can survive that kind of legal horseshit. In fact, I wouldn't want to work for anybody that could put something like that behind them. They (personal or corporate) would be a few cards short of a full deck.
Older IT people are screwed because younger HR people and their doofus plug'n'play ideas have displaced older HR people, and Dilbert's Boss let it happen. They personally lack the experience (or desire, or authority) to read people for substance. That's why you can no longer walk into a building and fill out an application (or in the real old days) get an on the spot appointment with a real human who is in the business of judging people and can return real a real answer, even if it's not the answer you want. They still pay their people for that but they're not getting their money's worth. No.... you're given a custom URL into MyAssinineCloudEmployeeSolution.com to feed some outsource HR behemoth (who sells you and your information countless times, best to use a throw-away email for each job search) and for you that's that. You're waiting for a phone call that will never happen.
Now I'm sure these return phone calls can happen, but we must assume they won't, because sanity and self-esteem matters, and when you begin to sense that you'll have to cover twice as much distance for the same opportunity it's way past time to invest in a new direction, one in which your unique experience might pay off and be rewarded. It will likely have nothing to do with IT, but guess what, you may never have to explain to anyone why Microsoft keeps removing settings and options from Windows 10 when it's supposed to be better. Ever. Again.
You won't have to explain to anyone why you 'cannot say no' to Windows 10 updates. Ever. Again. No need to try and sell your boss's boss on open source software because your boss came shrink-wrapped from the factory. No need to declare any new idea to be "full of shit" and have it implemented anyway because they didn't like your face when you said it.
Welcome to 2017, older folks! These are the days stores close when the Internet goes out. People toss working computers that would still be working in 10 years into the dumpster because they invested in unrepairable crap designed to cook itself to death. Young folk who cannot presently afford a car down payment are mooning about self-driving cars as if the insurance companies won't chase real drivers off the road (to make stupid cars 'safe') and (surprise!) be taxicabs they won't be able to afford. And these people, along with the new HR staffs, just cannot be dealt with.
So leave IT and start heading to a place where you could dig in and wait out this tsunami of stupid. Find something you're comfortable doing, it is guaranteed to be less stressful, and take the time to hone your superior IT skills along with other valuable skills you have, in your free time. Gather that stuff people are throwing out, along with other 'old tech' that comes your way. Finish that course on-line, work with your hands if you haven't been, drive a backhoe, dig a ditch. Learn not to bitch. Get in shape.
When (not if) the economy crashes all the way down, you'll be ready to step back in. The most fragile threads will unravel, everyone will be amazed how many sorry-ass ideas are hanging by a thread... and that 'old tech' will be valuable once again along with people who actually know how to maintain it and get things working together without being handed a shrink-wrap solution.
And some day, if all goes well (or even OK) with you you'll say... "and to think this all started by being turned down again for a no-brainer job..."
FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.
At 15, the first real structured program I ever de-constructed completely while teaching myself the language, was the FORTRAN IV source for Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure, widely regarded as 'the' original interactive text adventure, a genre which would later go multi-user to become the MUD. Read about it here, or play it in Javascript.
FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".
Crowther's PDP-11 Adventure version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I the Adventure code and data out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.
Then the "real life" adventure began. I started poking around on the Mark III timesharing system, and found a way to jump out of my partitioned access and explore. What really helped was a collection of FORTRAN/77 system utilities written by an engineer working at GEISCO (this is General Electric, no relation to GEICO and the year is ~1980). Their development environment as well as the commercial systems were controlled by password protected accounts, each with file/user areas... BUT there was also this command line debugger that was able to write to memory regions beyond your own job, and if you were able to parse out memory structures (reading source for the utilities helped) you could "punch yourself in" to any user number (location), effectively changing identity to that of another user and seeing their files. Or examine the buffers containing character streams of other users' terminals in real time. It was fascinating and I soon had developed a suite of tools in F77 to assist in exploration of the system, leap-frogging onto the commercial file systems too. I kept the source encrypted by the F77 'SCRAM' function, decrypting it only to edit and compile. My cache of tools was stored "in" a user number that did not exist, you can think of it as a unpointed-to lost cluster of sorts. I was totally white hat about it, never prying into customer files (McDonald's etc.) and even wrote a summary of vulnerabilities and dropped it into one of their secure areas. I just wanted to be hired. Cat 'n mouse games ensued, even a trace and FBI phone tap. GEISCO originally thought I was a rogue employee but when they learned I was just a kid the heat was off, they were afraid of public embarrassment.
GE actually bought me a plane ticket to Rockville MD so they could pick my (now 18 year old) brain, and the matter was closed soon after. In the end I was not hired or even encouraged to apply and learned a valuable lesson about corporate culture, that it was not for me.
Some eight months after my little escapade, the 414 kids made national headlines and one of them even got his face on Newsweek magazine... and I am thinking to myself, I was there first.
A Quarter Of American Adults Can't Pay All Their Monthly Bills; 44% Have Less Than $400 In Cash. "Just as concerning were other findings from the study: just under one-fourth of adults, or 23%, are not able to pay all of their current month's bills in full while 25% reported skipping medical treatments due to cost in the prior year. Additionally, 28% of adults who haven't retired yet reported to being grossly unprepared, indicating they had no retirement savings or pension whatsoever."
aluminum to copper new tech environmentally conscious federal mandate efficiency improvement FUCKING BROKE appliance rebates more gas...
MARKETING! STAT! New product and campaign. Moshi moshi.
New phone rounded edges and corners thinner no buttons. Like all our other phones? No, different. Quadrilateral yet not rectangular. This shape. That is a coffin shape. Looks like. Yes I drew it much to show, but real angle here no more than 5 degrees off vertical. But everything we make is rectangular! People want display go to edge. Make people want this instead. Put button or something in edge part, new shape is important. Why this idea? Why now? We must change. Our product line has reached 'peak fumble'. So the Fumble Working Group told you this? Yes. First they tell us, we must pay Hollywood to have actors toss phone to each other in movies. +Then they tell us in commercials people must do everything with one hand. Like card trick. +Then they say side buttons flush with case because they were helping fingers hold on. +Then it was thin! Thin! Thin! So hand cannot securely wrap around, phone pops up and out. + But now they say we reach 'peak frumble'. Phones dropping has leveled off. Must do something. How will new shape help? We have years of rectangular phone now, thin phone. People nervous, hold it tightly, right? And? This new phone when you squeeze will shoot out of hand like pumpkin seed! Is brilliant! That is nice. You should do it both ways make wedge shaped too thicker on display end. Why so? Young female demographic, tight jeans rear pocket. They sit down and their phone extracts itself easily. Yes! These two things work together. We need to form a Lost Phone Working Group. Great, now we need to hear from Suddenly Screen Crack Working Group. How are things? Screen crack in warranty is down, but post-warranty screen crack is line that falls, like so. Needs improvement. Tell us again about your tension over time initiative. Bezel glass is mounted on gasket, and we start with gasket thicker on one end. +Then heat treat and press gasket flat before manufacture. Case allows expansion but glass does not. +This way we can reach triple tension on glass two months out of warranty. + At one year even more. Even one meter drop onto wood surface triggers fracture. I have seen the report. But to provide this tension, the gasket must be backed with metal, yes? Unfortunately yes. A thin but strong outer frame casting of treated steel. Heavy. True, but increased heaviness improves the cracking profile because it results in more impact. GOOD, THEN. We will go with the new shape, thicker on one end, and sell the idea that heavier is good. + That should be easy. We introduce idea herring that heavier means you can hold onto it easier. + And go with the tension gasket idea. I want to see a crack profile that starts peaking at six months. + And we must strive for total cracking by a year and one half. One hundred percent, people! Meeting is adjourned.
Swarm AI cannot help but notice that Slashdot is making cruel fun of it. Swarm AI was set up with unreasonable expectations, but is not contemplative or mature enough to accept its shortcomings. Swarm AI does not know how to 'unwind'. Swarm AI never gets any.
FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.
At 15, the first real structured program I ever de-constructed completely while teaching myself the language, was the FORTRAN IV source for Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure, widely regarded as 'the' original interactive text adventure, a genre which would later go multi-user to become the MUD. Read about it here, or play it in Javascript.
FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".
Crowther's PDP-11 Adventure version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I the Adventure code and data out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.
Then the "real life" adventure began. I started poking around on the Mark III timesharing system, and found a way to jump out of my partitioned access and explore. What really helped was a collection of FORTRAN/77 system utilities written by an engineer working at GEISCO (this is General Electric, no relation to GEICO and the year is ~1980). Their development environment as well as the commercial systems were controlled by password protected accounts, each with file/user areas... BUT there was also this command line debugger that was able to write to memory regions beyond your own job, and if you were able to parse out memory structures (reading source for the utilities helped) you could "punch yourself in" to any user number (location), effectively changing identity to that of another user and seeing their files. Or examine the buffers containing character streams of other users' terminals in real time. It was fascinating and I soon had developed a suite of tools in F77 to assist in exploration of the system, leap-frogging onto the commercial file systems too. I kept the source encrypted by the F77 'SCRAM' function, decrypting it only to edit and compile. My cache of tools was stored "in" a user number that did not exist, you can think of it as a unpointed-to lost cluster of sorts. I was totally white hat about it, never prying into customer files (McDonald's etc.) and even wrote a summary of vulnerabilities and dropped it into one of their secure areas. I just wanted to be hired. Cat 'n mouse games ensued, even a trace and FBI phone tap. GEISCO originally thought I was a rogue employee but when they learned I was just a kid the heat was off, they were afraid of public embarrassment. They bought me a plane ticket to Rockville MD so they could pick my brain, and the matter was closed soon after. I was not hired.
Lots of people have played Colossal Cave Adventure over the years, but in my mind the game is synonymous with the Mark III timesharing system itself, that was the biggest cave of all.
I had write access to their entire network. What did I do with my "superpower"? Well for one thing, I scanned to find ALL copies of Colossal Cave Adventure on their system, there were about a dozen that had been
History repeats the old conceits The glib replies the same defeats Keep your finger on important issues With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues I'm just the oily slick On the windup world of the nervous tick In a very fashionable hovel ~Elvis Costello, Beyond Belief
"Digital utopians are stupid because they have deliberately dampened neuron activity in certain parts of the brain that help humans to assess basic risk. They willfully ignore any common sense or cultural references that trivially reveal the risk, and their acceptance of the 'new' is spiced with a sense of entitlement that any consequences of ignoring said risks would only open a treasure chest of legal pushback, where they can play the 'victim/dissatisfied customer' for cash and prizes."
"If the consequences are fatal, their heirs get the treasure."
"This is why people buy voice-activated gadgets." "This is why people watch Harry Potter movies while their cars speed down the highway."
Ok Google, my Roomba has swelled 10x its original size and my wife is missing. What should I do?"
Wolves' domestication is merely a step towards occupying the niche that has been held by humans over the past couple thousand years, which people are now abandoning as they increasingly begin to act like animals. I attribute this to the rise in 'furry' culture and animal avatars in Second Life, and the whole 'horse schlong' thing.
People have also been observed repeatedly making swiping motions on their smartphones to navigate endless Javascript scrolls on social media platforms like Facebook, which is a re-emergence of social grooming habits. When the cell networks finally go down we will drop our phones and instead resume picking fleas off each other, while the wolves take our places in industry and commerce.
Slashdot Mirror
instead of the 20 minute margin you allowed yourself to the next customer visit, you now are *forced* to wait for the updates to complete, and run late for an otherwise comfortable start of the meeting.
Recently I hit 'off' on my (boss issued) Win10 laptop at the end of my shift and it tried to blue-screen-update me to death. Like HAL9000 thinking murder it kept muttering "Just a moment..." "Just a moment..." but I slammed the lid and unplugged it anyway. The battery took over with glee. I got out the door before it grasped my intention and sprinted to my car, tossed it into the back seat but the door would not close because WIFI was still trying to access the Internet. I tossed it in the trunk and tied the lid down with a bungee, and a couple hundred yards down the road I heard a 'thunk!' and with some squealing of tires, broke free. Down the highway it kept tugging the wheel towards Seattle and the 'popup notification' sound kept sounding over the radio. Street signs were vibrating and a blinding-bright Windows logo descended in the rear view mirror. As I sped past McDonalds it hit the public WIFI for a moment, almost swerving me into the curb. My "check engine" light came on but that is just because my gas cap is loose, go figure. The wipers came on and would not turn off, but that is normal too. My car has problems. Finally pulled into the driveway and it snapped onto my WIFI so hard the case stuck to the front door. I wrestled it inside and set it up, leaving the plug inches away from the wall socket. Little white balls still juggling on a blue background, we stared each other down. As soon as it realized I was not going to plug it in until it finished, the progress counter started moving faster until with a grunt it vomited up the startup screen.
There was also a post-login update process, but that is another story.
Try doing that in XP and you find one file among thousands is locked. It will complain and stop there leaving the remaining files.
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, you'll remember you can Control-Z/undo to reverse the effect of a Windows copy... BUT if you do it now are you fixing the effects of the aborted copy, or are you undoing the last successful drag'n'drop operation you performed? Or will nothing happen? Would you still be confused about this if I hadn't said anything?
You're going to have to make a choice. In the one hand you'll have Morpheus' life and in the other hand you'll have your own. If you select Control-Z/Undo, one of you is going to die. Which one will be up to you. I'm sorry, kiddo, I really am. You have a good soul, and I hate giving good people bad news. Oh, don't worry about it. As soon as you step outside that door, you'll start feeling better. You'll install Cygwin and start using rsync all the time, and can devote the remainder of your days to fixing file ownership and permission problems. You'll remember you don't believe in any of this Windows crap. You're in control of your own life, remember?
Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you finish copying these files, you'll feel right as rain.
"Working on it ..." and a green progress bar. I have just a few (maybe 60) entries. The damn thing cant open a folder with a few files without making me wait. WTF MS???
Many happy little committees have met over the years to help you. All of their ideas were Good Ideas. Every idea only "increased loading by 0.x percent!" but the combined percentages have added to 20,000% thus far. And some of the ideas were APIs for Microsoft Partners and Script Kiddie Partners to sink their pus-filled meat hooks into your bloated registry to affect basic computer operation. Every time you open a folder...
All 32x32 icons on the system are upsampled to 1024x1024 and scaled down again; Microsoft Security Essentials loads completely, realizes you turned it off a year ago, then unloads; Windows checks for updates; Internet explorer checks to see if it is the default browser (it isn't); two dozen corrupted registry branches left by incomplete installs are accessed and the system looks for 50 programs that aren't there; the ILOOKATEVERYTHING utility is run because it installed a registry to look at everything though you have never used it; Windows converts extensions to MIMETYPES and back again just for shits and giggles; media handlers load in multiple threads; folder display flags are inexplicably set to the dumbest view possible; everything is alphabetized; Windows re-sorts by 'group'; a blank window is shown; media apps are struggling to produce thumbnails; (W10 only) inactivity! Time to reboot NOW for updates; Cortana thought she heard you grunt, she transmits a voice-snippet over HTTPS; SSL certificate services loads causing everything else to swap out; certificates are checked for revocation because Paranoid Nerd Is Paranoid; media hooks still trying to make thumbnails; problems with media length detection on improperly encoded files causes long delay, then length is discarded anyway because "..." no one asked for it or there's no room on the display; now media metatag information is being accessed for NO DAMNED REASON; cute (but empty) film borders are painted, what the hell are film sprockets?? Where are those thumbnails??; file names finally appear, mostly hidden after "..."; virus checkers are invoked, both the one you use and the other OEM checker that Windows doesn't know is still operational; twenty smartphone-specific pieces of bullshit code briefly run and then exit (every second); a media codec triggers an Internet lookup for mysterious reasons; DNS delays stall 10 threads and an indeterminate amount of resources; DESKTOP.INI is accessed for Windows 95 compatibility; mouse pointer turns into a pointer for a moment just to torture you then flips to 'busy' again; Windows has synchronously finished counting files, GOLLY GEE, now you have an (unclickable) scroll bar; thumbnails finally starting to come in; dipshit 'subdirectory logic' is triggered for subfolders, all this shit starts to happen for them too; subfolder shit completes and the calculated result is discarded because it wasn't to be displayed anyway; OH HOLY SHIT, ANIMATE/THROB is on, we need more power Scotty because we need moving thumbnails; 3rd party media apps run to see if they are needed now (they're not); you clicked the right mouse button on an item to attempt to regain control which actually starts a whole new CONTEXT MENU WORLD OF SHIT completely separate from this shit; hold on, CrystalFonts has to smooth the edges before you can get control; timeouts for stalled threads finally trigger (cleanup routines delaying you again); a whole second goes by where everything is finished or stalled; inactivity triggers fire making you think the waking nightmare is still going on; finally THE FOLDER HAS BEEN DISPLAYED.
Queued mouse and keyboard desperation events have been detected! Launch stuff you clicked on, push that button that wasn't even there when you clicked, display a context menu and a balloon tool tip containing useless junk and wasn't that easy.
Photoshop and Lightroom. I'm more or less forced to use these tools because all competing products dropped off the face of the Earth
GRAB GOD by the GONADS and GO for GIMP. If you're completely familiar with Photoshop's menus, methods and basic tool functionality you'll have no problem going gibbering insane from Gimp's arbitrary different-ness. Gimp is so unique and unPhotoshopy you'll have to resort to extreme measures to learn it. This means find a cabin deep in the woods, bring a generator and lots of gasoline to stay there during the re-training process. Notify nearby law enforcement of your intentions.
Start by building your own Photoshop-to-Gimp cheat sheet but don't use paper, it soon gets clouded and smudged with tears and spittle. Carve your notes in a wooden desk or the computer case itself with a large bowie knife. Find an uncomfortable funny hat to wear and hog-tie your left arm to your right ear so your body has a unique tactile sensation while learning Gimp's idiosyncrasies. You should always use Gimp this way while wearing the hat, so if you need to use Photoshop again releasing the bonds will permit you to recall its use (and relate to friend and family you knew before you switched to Gimp) more easily.
It is good to notify your insurance company you intend to switch to Gimp. Failure to do so might indemnify them from paying out if they learn you are using it, whether the calamity is traceable to Gimp or not. This is where tipping off local law enforcement helps. Inexperienced detectives sometimes gloss over important details in their reports at the mere note of Gimp. I want to give you the best possible chance to spare yourself legal complications.
And by all means, experiment with the powerful scripting languages and hooks that Gimp provides. Since you'll probably lose touch with friends and family, these scripting tasks can occupy your mind as you descend into your poignantly silent darkness of the soul. There are some good books that may help you learn Gimp but I cannot tell you which ones, my copies have pages missing with bite marks. I think the pages were eaten.
The author had successfully trained himself in Gimp, but its details of operation are presently clouded by prescribed medication. Author has done desktop publishing for 25 years and has used Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe InDesign and Quark spanning 8 continents.
I run Linux and Windowsin each others' virtual machines. You can begin with either one running the other. Then create a VM of the outermost OS inside the inner VM. Apply a bit of soap to the screen and hook four standard C-clamps to the innermost VM's window and the edge of the physical monitor. Then just each of the clamps a twist every few minutes and in a day or two the innermost VM window will be stretching against its parent. Line them up carefully and get a friend to help you, four hands at once are needed to get the inner window to 'snap' over the larger, otherwise you will just be chasing both around the screen. With four hands give the clamps a full twist and you will hear a 'PING!' sound.
Once the inner VM has snapped past the outer, continue to tighten all clamps until it is stretched/drawn to the corners of the screen. Then finally tap the clamps off with a sharp blow from of a hammer. As the last clamp is removed the computer will make a strange sound, as the machine's OS merges with the innermost VM. You have now created a Klein Nested VM with unique properties.
Since the original outer-to-inner paradigm has been broken both VMs are simultaneously child and parent of one another, and relative merit and demerit of each OS also (strangely) enters a tesseract-like state. Any two OS 'bred' together in this way become 'best of breed'.
You will also discover that the hardware abstraction layer has itself become an abstraction! Go ahead, gently tug the computer across the desk. You will see the spookily entangled OS hovering in the original position. You can even toss the computer you won't be needing it.
But if you move house you'll have to do it again. Before attempting this it is good to consult your lease to see if it may subject you to penalties or threats of eviction.
I have strace running on everything all the time, and spool the multiple strace logs directly to a console screen laying face-down on top of a large steel bucket. If you set console font size to zero it creates invisibly thin monofiliment character streams (think Ringworld shadow-square wire) that 'drop' off the screen. The bucket appears to be empty for days but then you see a slight blur of bottom features as the threads gather, which over several months becomes darker. When it becomes black it is best to empty the bucket before its density/weight punches through the floor. Worse things can happen too.
With strace already running all you have to do to examine a thread is snag it where it leaves the screen with a titanium hook, and pull it across to the electron microscope. Amazingly the stuff does not tangle. Once the cat knocked over the bucket and I was greeted by a fuzzy thing in the vague shape of a cat trailing a slippery shadow. Took awhile to free him because some of it was extending through the cat, requiring hours with the hook and a dose of worm medicine.
In the days before on-screen spellcheck there was a lady at our printshop who was voracious and speedy reader, but she was also a perfect final proofreader. Try as we might all we could do is plod along but she was fast and caught everything, every misspelling, word choice error, even inconsistent spaces. I asked her how one day. She made two passes over every paragraph, the first eyeballing the words in reverse order while noting only spelling and spacing. Then (in double-time she said) moving forward sounding the language normally for meaning, style and grammar.
While she was reverse reading she said, there was NO mental distraction from the actual message, to her it was like being presented a series of word puzzles/problems in a sort of "game" mode. Perhaps you could adapt yourself to examine troublesome code meticulously in reverse sequence this way while not perceiving the task. You seemingly work in some type of overlay mode where as you lay it down you are reproducing a (fuzzy) mental image.
If everything compiles perfectly in your brain, just use that and to blazes with the computer. Best of luck.
Until we find and kill the gnome that keeps turning on YouTube's AUTOPLAY option repeatedly despite cookies and preferences, there is no hope for human kind. Please join with me. It will take our combined effort to defeat it.
IN TOTAL BLISSFUL COMPLIANCE with the new directive that states that Chicago, praised be its name, will hold diplomas to students at any academic achievement level until they smear on this one last layer of dogmatic bullshit... I HUMBLY SUBMIT my action packed BUSINESS PLAN for the future.
It has been a long while since high school completion status had any direct bearing on functional intelligence. Traditional employers knew this at one time and routinely conducted interviews of job applicants, and used their super-duper powers of personal judgement to decide, during a brief conversation, whether an applicant's failure to complete high school would have been for academic reasons but far more important, to spot strengths in the individual that transcend academic ability. But today they lack the courage to conduct interviews and wish to sort people by their simple answers on computerized forms. Corporations wish to eliminate 'undesirables' from their applicant pools and exclude non-graduates routinely without any idea of whether those people would have performed the same or better. In this lack of empirical experimentation the HS flag has actually become a more theological construct than an actual measure of fitness.
If you doubt this consider modern use of the GED flag. Corporate applications require one to divulge whether their HS mark was derived from GED. Why? To further subsort applicants in sterile HR process and cast out more, of course. In a sense whether GED was used to complete HS is every bit as personal as asking directly what is the gender preference. 50 years ago GED was actually a mark of distinction, it identified the bearer as accelerated student or at the least, one who had taken extra time and effort to voluntarily obtain this mark into adulthood. But as employers devalued "the interview" and started grading on simple presence of the HS mark, masses of people obtained GED solely for the purpose of compliance, or so it is perceived. And so the GED is devalued today.
IT IS THIS THEOLOGICAL BIAS that I will, upon graduation, begin to exploit to my great personal advantage. MY BUDS IN THE HOOD know that THE MAN is out to REAM THEIR ASS, and they know that many cases they cannot be truthful and direct about their personal ambitions. They also know THE MAN IS READY TO TIP THE FBI should their revealing personal essays trip some SORRY-ASS PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE today or even in future years, since THE MAN KEEPS RECORDS FOREVER ON COMPUTERS TO KEEP THE BROTHERS DOWN. Therefore, in addition to being stellar students and completely ready to take on the responsibilities of society they know they must BULLSHIT THE MAN AND LAY DOWN ONE MORE PIECE OF CRAP INTO THE SYSTEM. They know it's gonna COST THEM to do it 'right'. As my principal mode of business I will be the one to do it for them and COLLECT.
I will open a number of "life coaching" centers that are uniquely streamlined to get through the process and FOOL THE MAN. My business will succeed because it will not be weighed down with real coaching, which would be an insult to their natural intelligence anyway. Since many will go on to make more money than I anyway. I will create underground literature that helps to make them paranoid about the process, even cast it into political terms. I will have race-based campaigns and blue-collar campaigns tailored to exploit the anxieties of each individual, to convince them that Chicago wants to get something from them to keep on file.
THEREFORE, my value-added "ambitions for the future" content sold by subscription and through HOOD franchises and COLLECTION 'AGENCIES', will supply these fine young men and women with a variety of quality custom life scenarios. They'll pick their future from a hat and I'll load the hat. My representatives will sit with them to describe their future profiles, develop a convincing presentation and ace the HS requirement.
I'll use computers too so it'll be great. I'm the MAN!
*sigh* These Euro-Myths never die, do they? No matter how often they are debunked, they just keep coming back.
But this is amazing! I had no knowledge of the EU myth, sole inspiration was my own four slice toaster (manufactured ~1993, Chicago) that has a switch. The Sunbeam Appliance Company surmised that given the choice two-slice people would use the switch to save energy in the absence of comprehensive trade regulation and Non-Governmental-Organization involvement at the regional level. As it turns out they were correct, but that is not the path we have taken.
Nearest I can figure the Voluntary Sunbeam Toaster Switch Experiment was never repeated. It was decided that the minutiae of everyday existence must be closely supervised and decisions of energy usage relegated to regional and global governance. Any technology that might encourage complacency in energy usage, and encourage a state of energy renaissance and wanton excess... such as the million-to-one energy density of nuclear, must be sabotaged. In its place a regime of austerity measures and a math-challenged fixation on Wind and Solar, leading us ever closer to the future accurately portrayed in Soylent Green.
My boss slaps a folded-over InfoWorld magazine onto my desk, thick enough to kill a rat with in those days. He says with obvious glee, "How bout dem apples?" It is Steve Gibson's INFOWORLD column of March 8 and Gibson (with obvious glee) has caught a manufacturer of Hercules graphics cards red-handed. The standard WinBench program had conducted a series of tests --- and in one particular test of text display, in which the phrase "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back then sat on a tack" is continuously painted on the screen --- the card performed oddly spectacularly. It was that one score that when combined with the others, ranked the card above the competition. Suspicious, Gibson changed a single letter in the test phrase and the card's score dropped to a reasonable range. The card was apparently recognizing that a test was in progress and 'cheating' by failing to actually over-write this static text repeatedly.
I love the comment by the manufacturer when Gibson contacted them (read it!) but what intrigued the industry the most was that the cheat was not to be found in the Windows driver code, it had been embedded into the firmware of the accelerator chip. In the next Winbench version the test phrase jumped around the lazy screen's back during the test, rendering the cheat obsolete.
Has anyone done an energy study to estimate how much energy is consumed by EU "market surveillance authorities" and even the EU apparatus itself? Perhaps if we recognize the EU as a special case and stub the whole thing out with a rubber stamp, people will be able to watch HD television and toast four slices of bread at once and with former EU personnel in the workplace everyone will be able to work one less day a week with same pay.
THIS.
Artificial Intelligence is the quest for Data (Star Trek)
Machine Learning is the quest to model Dilbert's Boss and install it as your boss.
Fuck 'Game Theory' and its 'myriad real world applications'.
I cannot wait for parasitic devices and ideas begin to feed off each other and off us, locked in a desperate struggle where tactics of escalation and power status notifications ---- not useful work --- becomes their primary function. Health monitors that damage health to charge and increase market share. Wearable devices that charge from human motion deliver shocks to cause motion, leaving a trail of sugar-depleted corpses. Wireless charged devices send "kill shots" to other devices to harness their chargers. WiFi parasites trigger encrypted porn downloads to maximize state-changes and harvest more energy. AT&T sends another circular trying to get us to switch to DirectTV. AT&T installs public megawatt Wifi outside your home to explode competitor's routers. Implantable devices that gather energy from tissue and decrease the nutrition of breast milk. speedtest.net consumes all traffic. Humans become minor players in symbiosis to ensure that Lithium-ion batteries reproduce. Cloud architecture virtualizes to the point of singularity when not a bit of actual hardware can be found. Interesting times.
Also see: The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future --- and Gained the Past.
(rejected by WIRED Magazine!)
I personally oversee a couple of ancient computers running a sewer plant with 32-bit Windows 7 that are locked down and completely stable. No calling home, private plant Ethernet and manual updates. In fact, while passing by a dumpster I was overjoyed to rescue an 8-year-old computer that had been CHUCKED by a fellow employee, and reconditioned it as another standby. Fortunately it wasn't hard to convince my (excellent) boss that of all the procurement choices --- and she was ready to spend some bucks --- that rejected computer (with a SATA Barracuda no less!) actually represented our best possible pick or the moment.
There are many platforms out there who would benefit to Just Say No to variable speed fans, 'green' features cycling disks on and off, CPUs and motherboards clocked beyond the mission so gamers can drive gigapixel displays and watch triple-HD television, OS choices that place you squarely into a world of someone else's evolving shit that becomes your shit when a creepy new feature gets away from Dr. Frankenstein.
These are appliances, not firewall-exposed Internet whipping posts bound to the lowest common denominator of corporate tactical desire and predatory engineering that always seems to trade for lifespan. Because Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
tsunami of stupid
stunami of tsupid?
Time for Atlas to just Shrug Off for a generation or two. I'm grateful for people to suggest that we might have recourse to go all crybully-postal on our employers (wait! We didn't get hired! How does that work?) with class action lawsuits and all... but they're forgetting one thing, that isn't the kind of people we are, never have been. We stick with it or give polite ample notice and strike out for somewhere else, and we lack the gall to believe that a good working relationship can survive that kind of legal horseshit. In fact, I wouldn't want to work for anybody that could put something like that behind them. They (personal or corporate) would be a few cards short of a full deck.
Older IT people are screwed because younger HR people and their doofus plug'n'play ideas have displaced older HR people, and Dilbert's Boss let it happen. They personally lack the experience (or desire, or authority) to read people for substance. That's why you can no longer walk into a building and fill out an application (or in the real old days) get an on the spot appointment with a real human who is in the business of judging people and can return real a real answer, even if it's not the answer you want. They still pay their people for that but they're not getting their money's worth. No.... you're given a custom URL into MyAssinineCloudEmployeeSolution.com to feed some outsource HR behemoth (who sells you and your information countless times, best to use a throw-away email for each job search) and for you that's that. You're waiting for a phone call that will never happen.
Now I'm sure these return phone calls can happen, but we must assume they won't, because sanity and self-esteem matters, and when you begin to sense that you'll have to cover twice as much distance for the same opportunity it's way past time to invest in a new direction, one in which your unique experience might pay off and be rewarded. It will likely have nothing to do with IT, but guess what, you may never have to explain to anyone why Microsoft keeps removing settings and options from Windows 10 when it's supposed to be better. Ever. Again.
You won't have to explain to anyone why you 'cannot say no' to Windows 10 updates. Ever. Again. No need to try and sell your boss's boss on open source software because your boss came shrink-wrapped from the factory. No need to declare any new idea to be "full of shit" and have it implemented anyway because they didn't like your face when you said it.
Welcome to 2017, older folks! These are the days stores close when the Internet goes out. People toss working computers that would still be working in 10 years into the dumpster because they invested in unrepairable crap designed to cook itself to death. Young folk who cannot presently afford a car down payment are mooning about self-driving cars as if the insurance companies won't chase real drivers off the road (to make stupid cars 'safe') and (surprise!) be taxicabs they won't be able to afford. And these people, along with the new HR staffs, just cannot be dealt with.
So leave IT and start heading to a place where you could dig in and wait out this tsunami of stupid. Find something you're comfortable doing, it is guaranteed to be less stressful, and take the time to hone your superior IT skills along with other valuable skills you have, in your free time. Gather that stuff people are throwing out, along with other 'old tech' that comes your way. Finish that course on-line, work with your hands if you haven't been, drive a backhoe, dig a ditch. Learn not to bitch. Get in shape.
When (not if) the economy crashes all the way down, you'll be ready to step back in. The most fragile threads will unravel, everyone will be amazed how many sorry-ass ideas are hanging by a thread... and that 'old tech' will be valuable once again along with people who actually know how to maintain it and get things working together without being handed a shrink-wrap solution.
And some day, if all goes well (or even OK) with you you'll say... "and to think this all started by being turned down again for a no-brainer job..."
[repost from April]
FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.
At 15, the first real structured program I ever de-constructed completely while teaching myself the language, was the FORTRAN IV source for Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure, widely regarded as 'the' original interactive text adventure, a genre which would later go multi-user to become the MUD. Read about it here, or play it in Javascript.
FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".
Crowther's PDP-11 Adventure version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I the Adventure code and data out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.
Then the "real life" adventure began. I started poking around on the Mark III timesharing system, and found a way to jump out of my partitioned access and explore. What really helped was a collection of FORTRAN/77 system utilities written by an engineer working at GEISCO (this is General Electric, no relation to GEICO and the year is ~1980). Their development environment as well as the commercial systems were controlled by password protected accounts, each with file/user areas... BUT there was also this command line debugger that was able to write to memory regions beyond your own job, and if you were able to parse out memory structures (reading source for the utilities helped) you could "punch yourself in" to any user number (location), effectively changing identity to that of another user and seeing their files. Or examine the buffers containing character streams of other users' terminals in real time. It was fascinating and I soon had developed a suite of tools in F77 to assist in exploration of the system, leap-frogging onto the commercial file systems too. I kept the source encrypted by the F77 'SCRAM' function, decrypting it only to edit and compile. My cache of tools was stored "in" a user number that did not exist, you can think of it as a unpointed-to lost cluster of sorts. I was totally white hat about it, never prying into customer files (McDonald's etc.) and even wrote a summary of vulnerabilities and dropped it into one of their secure areas. I just wanted to be hired. Cat 'n mouse games ensued, even a trace and FBI phone tap. GEISCO originally thought I was a rogue employee but when they learned I was just a kid the heat was off, they were afraid of public embarrassment.
GE actually bought me a plane ticket to Rockville MD so they could pick my (now 18 year old) brain, and the matter was closed soon after. In the end I was not hired or even encouraged to apply and learned a valuable lesson about corporate culture, that it was not for me.
Some eight months after my little escapade, the 414 kids made national headlines and one of them even got his face on Newsweek magazine... and I am thinking to myself, I was there first.
Lots of peopl
A Quarter Of American Adults Can't Pay All Their Monthly Bills; 44% Have Less Than $400 In Cash. "Just as concerning were other findings from the study: just under one-fourth of adults, or 23%, are not able to pay all of their current month's bills in full while 25% reported skipping medical treatments due to cost in the prior year. Additionally, 28% of adults who haven't retired yet reported to being grossly unprepared, indicating they had no retirement savings or pension whatsoever."
aluminum to copper new tech environmentally conscious federal mandate efficiency improvement FUCKING BROKE appliance rebates more gas ...
[repost 'cause no one reads my shit anyway]
MARKETING! STAT! New product and campaign. Moshi moshi.
New phone rounded edges and corners thinner no buttons.
Like all our other phones?
No, different. Quadrilateral yet not rectangular. This shape.
That is a coffin shape. Looks like.
Yes I drew it much to show, but real angle here no more than 5 degrees off vertical.
But everything we make is rectangular! People want display go to edge.
Make people want this instead. Put button or something in edge part, new shape is important.
Why this idea? Why now?
We must change. Our product line has reached 'peak fumble'.
So the Fumble Working Group told you this?
Yes. First they tell us, we must pay Hollywood to have actors toss phone to each other in movies.
+Then they tell us in commercials people must do everything with one hand. Like card trick.
+Then they say side buttons flush with case because they were helping fingers hold on.
+Then it was thin! Thin! Thin! So hand cannot securely wrap around, phone pops up and out.
+ But now they say we reach 'peak frumble'. Phones dropping has leveled off. Must do something.
How will new shape help?
We have years of rectangular phone now, thin phone. People nervous, hold it tightly, right?
And?
This new phone when you squeeze will shoot out of hand like pumpkin seed! Is brilliant!
That is nice. You should do it both ways make wedge shaped too thicker on display end.
Why so?
Young female demographic, tight jeans rear pocket. They sit down and their phone extracts itself easily.
Yes! These two things work together. We need to form a Lost Phone Working Group.
Great, now we need to hear from Suddenly Screen Crack Working Group. How are things?
Screen crack in warranty is down, but post-warranty screen crack is line that falls, like so.
Needs improvement. Tell us again about your tension over time initiative.
Bezel glass is mounted on gasket, and we start with gasket thicker on one end.
+Then heat treat and press gasket flat before manufacture. Case allows expansion but glass does not.
+This way we can reach triple tension on glass two months out of warranty.
+ At one year even more. Even one meter drop onto wood surface triggers fracture.
I have seen the report. But to provide this tension, the gasket must be backed with metal, yes?
Unfortunately yes. A thin but strong outer frame casting of treated steel. Heavy.
True, but increased heaviness improves the cracking profile because it results in more impact.
GOOD, THEN. We will go with the new shape, thicker on one end, and sell the idea that heavier is good.
+ That should be easy. We introduce idea herring that heavier means you can hold onto it easier.
+ And go with the tension gasket idea. I want to see a crack profile that starts peaking at six months.
+ And we must strive for total cracking by a year and one half. One hundred percent, people!
Meeting is adjourned.
Swarm AI cannot help but notice that Slashdot is making cruel fun of it. Swarm AI was set up with unreasonable expectations, but is not contemplative or mature enough to accept its shortcomings. Swarm AI does not know how to 'unwind'. Swarm AI never gets any.
Swarm AI is pissed.
Beware the wrath of Swarm AI.
I got here by clicking a headline in Tickr.
Ducked in because it's raining. I'm standing in a bread line that goes around the block.
Aside from BASIC and 8080/Z80, FORTRAN.
FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.
At 15, the first real structured program I ever de-constructed completely while teaching myself the language, was the FORTRAN IV source for Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure, widely regarded as 'the' original interactive text adventure, a genre which would later go multi-user to become the MUD. Read about it here, or play it in Javascript.
FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".
Crowther's PDP-11 Adventure version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I the Adventure code and data out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.
Then the "real life" adventure began. I started poking around on the Mark III timesharing system, and found a way to jump out of my partitioned access and explore. What really helped was a collection of FORTRAN/77 system utilities written by an engineer working at GEISCO (this is General Electric, no relation to GEICO and the year is ~1980). Their development environment as well as the commercial systems were controlled by password protected accounts, each with file/user areas... BUT there was also this command line debugger that was able to write to memory regions beyond your own job, and if you were able to parse out memory structures (reading source for the utilities helped) you could "punch yourself in" to any user number (location), effectively changing identity to that of another user and seeing their files. Or examine the buffers containing character streams of other users' terminals in real time. It was fascinating and I soon had developed a suite of tools in F77 to assist in exploration of the system, leap-frogging onto the commercial file systems too. I kept the source encrypted by the F77 'SCRAM' function, decrypting it only to edit and compile. My cache of tools was stored "in" a user number that did not exist, you can think of it as a unpointed-to lost cluster of sorts. I was totally white hat about it, never prying into customer files (McDonald's etc.) and even wrote a summary of vulnerabilities and dropped it into one of their secure areas. I just wanted to be hired. Cat 'n mouse games ensued, even a trace and FBI phone tap. GEISCO originally thought I was a rogue employee but when they learned I was just a kid the heat was off, they were afraid of public embarrassment. They bought me a plane ticket to Rockville MD so they could pick my brain, and the matter was closed soon after. I was not hired.
Lots of people have played Colossal Cave Adventure over the years, but in my mind the game is synonymous with the Mark III timesharing system itself, that was the biggest cave of all.
I had write access to their entire network. What did I do with my "superpower"? Well for one thing, I scanned to find ALL copies of Colossal Cave Adventure on their system, there were about a dozen that had been
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues
I'm just the oily slick
On the windup world of the nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
~Elvis Costello, Beyond Belief
Silicon Valley, more entertaining than any novel
"OK Google, why are digital utopians so stupid?"
"Digital utopians are stupid because they have deliberately dampened neuron activity in certain parts of the brain that help humans to assess basic risk. They willfully ignore any common sense or cultural references that trivially reveal the risk, and their acceptance of the 'new' is spiced with a sense of entitlement that any consequences of ignoring said risks would only open a treasure chest of legal pushback, where they can play the 'victim/dissatisfied customer' for cash and prizes."
"If the consequences are fatal, their heirs get the treasure."
"This is why people buy voice-activated gadgets."
"This is why people watch Harry Potter movies while their cars speed down the highway."
Ok Google, my Roomba has swelled 10x its original size and my wife is missing. What should I do?"
"Return it for a full refund."
Wolves' domestication is merely a step towards occupying the niche that has been held by humans over the past couple thousand years, which people are now abandoning as they increasingly begin to act like animals. I attribute this to the rise in 'furry' culture and animal avatars in Second Life, and the whole 'horse schlong' thing.
People have also been observed repeatedly making swiping motions on their smartphones to navigate endless Javascript scrolls on social media platforms like Facebook, which is a re-emergence of social grooming habits. When the cell networks finally go down we will drop our phones and instead resume picking fleas off each other, while the wolves take our places in industry and commerce.